by Gwen Florio
‘I’m gone.’ Bobby hurried around the other side of the house, back to his endless windows. Grace headed for the back door, slowed by the necessity of balancing the discarded glasses on a tray. Too late.
‘What do we have here?’
Todd moved quickly to the door, blocking her way.
‘Where’s Penelope?’
‘Getting her things. Said she’d be right down.’ It was, as far as Grace could remember, the first time she’d ever spoken to him.
‘Knowing Penelope, that means fifteen minutes. Gives us time for a quickie. Come on. Whaddaya say?’
Grace’s forearms flexed. The glasses rattled on the tray. She imagined them crashing against his face, the glass shattering against his forehead, the tepid tea mingling with hot blood.
He took a step toward her. Reached for the tray. ‘Let’s get this out of the way.’ She jerked away and watched it fly from her hands, the only barrier between them, a potential weapon gone, the glasses catching the sunlight as they fell, shattering into sparkling shards on the patio’s bricks,
Todd stood so close she could smell him, soap and aftershave and something musky, feral. His breathing quickened. A flush climbed his face.
‘Leave me alone.’ Her voice rose.
His hand shot out, his fingers pinching her nipple through the thin fabric of her housedress and bra, squeezing, twisting.
She cried out.
He dropped his hand, laughing, and fumbled at the front of his jeans. Then he was gone, falling away from her so fast that she staggered back into the wall and slid down to the patio’s sun-warmed bricks. Todd, too, was on the ground, writhing backward to escape an assailant of his own.
Bobby stood over him, fists raised. ‘Get up. Get up. What did you do to my sister?’
‘No, Bobby!’ Grace gasped. Somehow she was on her feet again, grabbing her brother’s upraised arms, trying to pull him away. But he stood still as granite, and just as immovable.
‘Get up.’
Todd scrambled to his feet, backing out of reach.
Grace let go of Bobby and stood between them on shaking legs. ‘I’m fine, Bobby. Everything’s fine.’
Todd’s thin lips wormed into a semblance of their characteristic smirk. ‘You heard her. She’s fine.’
‘You did something to her. Look at her. She’s not fine.’
Todd edged farther away.
‘She liked it. Soon as you left out of here, she was all over me.’
Bobby crouched, ready to leap on him. A voice floated from the house.
‘Todd? Where’d you go?’
Bobby straightened. Grace watched the fear and false bravado drain from Todd’s face. The door banged open. Penelope stood within it, hands on hips, looking to each of them in turn.
‘What’s going on here?’
Grace turned away, afraid of what Penelope might see in her face.
Todd recovered first, with the same practiced ease with which he’d left off tormenting Grace during his ballgames.
‘Grace dropped the tray.’
‘Then clean it up. And be glad it’s not the Waterford.’
Early on, Grace had poured drinks into the pretty cut-glass tumblers that had a cabinet all to themselves, only to elicit a horrified shriek from Penelope. ‘Not the Waterford! Mom’ll kill us if she finds out we’ve used it.’
Penelope issued another order – ‘Come on, Todd. We’re going to miss the best part of the day’ – and disappeared back into the house.
‘You heard her,’ Todd said to Grace. ‘Clean it up.’
And, with the security of knowing his girlfriend remained within earshot of any raised voices, any sounds of a further scuffle, muttered to Bobby as he passed, ‘Better watch your back from here on out, boy.’
That night, Grace undressed carefully, averting her eyes from her body until the last possible moment. Bruises bloomed across the swollen flesh. She cupped her breast gently in her palm, thinking of the question she’d posed Bobby as they walked home together that evening, the fury wafting off him in waves; a question he deigned not to answer.
‘Still think things are changing?’
FIFTEEN
Nora stepped out of the library into the sun, its warmth welcome even as it blinded her.
Emily’s story had left her chilled. Images flashed like an old-fashioned newsreel through her head. People marching, staging sit-ins. A confrontation. A shot. Bobby Evans slumping to the ground, much as his nephew had a half-century later. Alden had shot Robert. But who took aim at Bobby, pulled the trigger?
The door to the hardware store opened as she passed. Cool air rushed out, along with a man who moved in front of her, so similar in height and build to her grandfather that she gasped. She stepped back and shaded her eyes, unaccountably relieved as a stranger came into focus.
‘Nora Best. Heard you were back in town. Happy to see you.’
He was one of those men who’d likely been almost too pretty as a boy and then watched those good looks fade into grotesquery as he aged: dark pouches under the eyes, the once-chiseled cheekbones sliding into wobbly jowls framing thin colorless lips, the neck gone soft and shapeless even as the belly protruded high and hard, preceding him like an announcement. Only the hair hinted at what it had once been, silver now instead of a likely blond, still thick and styled in a vain backsweep.
He held out his hand. ‘Todd Burris. Your mother and I went to school together.’
‘Of course.’ She couldn’t place him, not exactly. There were almost as many white Burrises in Chateau as there were black Evanses.
He helped her out. ‘I own the car dealership and body shop.’
‘Of course.’ That explained the blazer and tie, the practiced smile, all teeth, stopping just before the eyes.
‘Saw you walking past and hustled outside to thank you.’ He was still holding her hand.
She pulled away. ‘For?’
‘For stepping up to help out Alden. Quicker we can get him out of this mess, the better.’
We? And how did he know … but this was Chateau. Nora fumbled for her keys and hit the unlock button on the fob. Her truck’s headlights blinked, signaling her intention to leave. ‘Nice to have met you,’ she began.
But Todd wasn’t done with her yet. ‘I found myself in the same sort of situation back in the day. That boy Alden shot? They thought I killed his uncle.’
Nora forgot about leaving.
‘Miss Grace’s brother? Bobby Evans?’
‘The one and the same. That boy who came back here stirring up all the trouble.’
There it was again. Boy.
‘Did you?’
He blinked. She’d gone off script.
‘Hell, no. Whoever shot him did it with some little popgun, nothing I’d ever own. Besides, I was down at the Beach that night. Half a dozen people vouched for me fifty ways to Sunday.’
She bet they had. But even as she fitted Todd Burris’s bulk into the shadowy outline of the killer in the story Emily Beattie had just told her, his next words dissolved her suspicions, even as they cemented her instinctive dislike of the man.
‘Tell you what, though. If I’d had the chance, I’d have shot him twice over.’
He grinned at the expression on her face, the meanness in it reaching his eyes this time. ‘He worked for your grandparents; used to hassle your mother something fierce. Wouldn’t leave her alone. This one time, if I hadn’t been around, Lord knows what might have happened. Smartest thing your parents ever did was send her off to New England. Of course, that didn’t work out too well for me. I sparked her, you know.’
Nora put a hand to her head. Too much information, too fast. Penelope – her delicate, wide-eyed mother who treasured fine things – used to date this goon? She tried to recapture her first fleeting impression of the young man he must have been, but saw instead her quiet, gentle father, a man who maintained his dignity even through the final agonizing months of ravaging disease.
‘Anyway.’ He
took a step closer, well into her personal space, that old tactic men liked to use on women. Nora planted her feet and waited.
‘Just wanted to let you know how much we all appreciate the way you’re helping Alden avoid the same B.S. I went through. You take care.’
He laid a meaty hand on her shoulder. Nora held herself very still until he’d disappeared back into the hardware store.
SIXTEEN
1963
By the time Chief Smythe fired Bobby, so many weeks had passed that Grace had almost started to think things would be all right.
One day, though, the Chief came home for lunch, as he sometimes did, but instead of heading into the kitchen where Grace, upon hearing the crunch of his squad car’s tires on the gravel driveway, had prepared a chicken salad sandwich and poured a glass of sweet tea, he instead strode around the corner of the house and into the backyard where Bobby was up on his ladder. Bobby was busy washing windowpane Number Five Hundred and Thirty-Eight, or at least that’s what he’d told Grace that morning. ‘I did the math,’ he said. ‘Time I finish, I’ll have to start all over again. I could be washing windows the rest of my life, seems like. If that isn’t incentive to get my ass to college, I don’t know what is.’
The Chief’s voice floated through the open kitchen window. ‘Bobby Evans, you get down off that ladder right now. I want to speak to you.’
Grace caught her breath. Philippa was in town. Penelope was still asleep. The Chief stood outside the library, looking up at the ladder. She wiped her hands on her apron and ran to the library and eased behind the drapes, careful not to disturb them, and lifted the window an inch, thankful it wasn’t one of the ones whose frame had warped over the years, leaving it impossible to raise. She pressed her back against the wall and listened.
‘Hey, Chief Smythe,’ Bobby said easily. Either he hadn’t caught the tone in the Chief’s voice or, more likely, he’d detected trouble and was trying to head it off.
The ladder creaked as Bobby descended.
‘What can I do for you, Chief Smythe?’
‘You can stay the hell away from my daughter.’
Grace clamped her hands over her mouth to keep a whimper from escaping. Of all the things that could have riled the Chief, this was the worst. Nothing – not guns or copperheads or a rusty nail to a bare foot – was more dangerous to a black man than a white woman; more deadly still when that woman was but a girl and the daughter of one of the most powerful men in town. Oh, Bobby. Tears dripped on to her fingers.
‘Sir. With all due respect, sir.’
‘Don’t you “sir” me. And don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.’ The Chief’s rage crashed through the open window like a thunderclap, pinning Grace in place.
‘Sir, please. If you just talk to Penelope. Miss Penelope.’
Oh, God. He’d slipped and slipped hard, and the Chief had caught it. His voice dropped a register and quieted, far more terrifying than if he’d raised it.
‘Don’t. You. Dare. Presume to address my child by her name. I don’t need to talk to her. Todd Burris told me all about what you’ve been up to. He said she’s been scared to death, locking herself in her room day and night, afraid of what you might do to her.’
Rage flooded Grace, replacing fear. Penelope Smythe stayed in her room all day because she was the laziest person on the face of the earth. And she didn’t lock her door, although Grace often wished she had, so that she wouldn’t be able to see the mess within – one more chore to deal with on her endless list.
Her hand went to her breast. Had Penelope really said that to Todd? Or had he fabricated it, making good on his promise to get back at Bobby? It didn’t matter. The Chief believed it. She thought of the service weapon that rode on the Chief’s hip, its polished walnut stock within ready reach. Fury, so energizing, ebbed as terror rushed back in. Would the Chief shoot Bobby on the spot? How would he explain it? Would he even have to?
‘Chief Smythe, I swear.’ The panic in Bobby’s voice mirrored her own.
‘Not another word out of you. Get the hell out of my sight and don’t let me ever see you again. Not around here, not around town, not on the road, not in the fields. You see me, you run like hell before I so much as catch a glimpse of you. You understand?’
The pounding of Bobby’s feet echoed the jackhammer in Grace’s heart. She didn’t wait for the Chief to fire her, too, but fled the library and down the long hall to the front door – the one she’d never used except to clean – untying her apron as she ran, dropping it in the driveway and sprinting after Bobby as fast as she could, trying to outrun the evil reaching for them both.
SEVENTEEN
The phone shrilled at eight in the morning, so startling Nora that she nearly upended her coffee. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard a landline, so much more insistent and demanding than the various chimes and chirrups of ringtones.
She dove for it, grabbing it on the third ring, glancing toward the phone’s blank surface, reflexively checking to see who was calling even though the ancient phone had no such function.
‘Quail House.’
‘I’m trying to reach Nora Best.’ A man’s voice.
‘Speaking.’
‘This is Stephen Abrams from the Baltimore Sun. I’m writing a story about the Robert Evans shooting.’
Nora froze. The man spoke into the silence. ‘I was hoping to talk with you about your account of the road-rage incident before the shooting.’
‘Excuse me?’ Nora held the phone away from her ear and glared at it. ‘How did you get my name?’
‘It was in the newspaper.’
‘It most certainly was not. I read the Chateau Crier myself and my name was not in that story.’
The paper lay on the table beside her with a damning banner headline:
Police: Road-Rage Incident Preceded Shooting
She’d gone cold at the sight of it, relaxing only when she’d realized the story hadn’t named her. But someone had.
‘I repeat my question: How did you get my name?’
A stalling tactic, useless. Because did it really matter how? They had it now. Stephen Abrams told her, anyway.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his tone so perfunctory as to negate any real apology. ‘I should have said. It was in the Afro. The, ah, Afro-American. It covers the black community in Baltimore.’
‘I know what the Afro is.’ But only because Emily Beattie had mentioned it the day before.
Abrams forged on. ‘So, as I said, I was hoping to talk with you about your account, as well as your relationship with Alden Tydings—’
Nora cut him off. ‘Sorry to disappoint you.’ She hung up without saying goodbye, fingers flying over her cellphone even as the old tabletop phone beside her vibrated from the force of the slammed-down receiver.
The Afro’s story largely mirrored the Crier’s account – the pro-forma statements from Brittingham that, as far as Nora was concerned, far exaggerated her own version of events – with two important differences.
One, a sentence whose impact landed like a fist, leaving her gasping: Brittingham did not identify the witness, but a source gave her name as Nora Best, once romantically involved with the officer who shot Robert Evans.
Along with a photo she hadn’t seen in years: herself in an off-the-shoulder dress with a poofy skirt, bracelets halfway up her forearm, hair teased and tousled and moussed – it had been her Madonna phase – beside Alden in a tux with a shiny teal bow tie that matched her dress. Their senior prom picture. Someone must have found a yearbook. Could anything be more embarrassing?
Then, a damning paragraph.
Best is the author of Do It Daily, a book promoting daily sex, and more recently was involved in a notorious kidnapping and murder case in Wyoming that left her husband dead. One suspect remains at large in that case. She could not be reached for comment, despite numerous attempts.
Nora thought of the repeated calls to her cell the previous day from an unrec
ognized number. The source who’d provided her name to the Afro must have had her phone number, too. Her mind went to the lone black cop assigned to door duty in the Chateau Police Department. She shied away from the thought. But the Sun reporter hadn’t had her cell number. Abrams must have found Penelope’s number online somewhere and called it as a Hail Mary. And Nora had played right into it, instead of putting him off with some innocuous response. ‘Wrong number,’ would have sufficed.
She read the paragraph again, the coy ‘involved in’ the Wyoming case, suggesting her involvement was somehow voluntary rather than the terror-filled event that had sent her fleeing to Chateau for solace.
She read on.
‘What’s that saying? Déjà vu all over again,’ said the Rev. James Warren, now retired, who was pastor of the AME Zion Church when Evans’s uncle was killed in Chateau. ‘They’re trying to make out like the victim is the one at fault, just like they did back then. And they got away with it then. But not now. Once was too much. Twice – no, we’re not having it.’
Along with a follow-up quote from Grace Evans, echoing the reverend’s words in far more poignant terms:
‘You think that once your heart is broken, the worst has happened. That the only good thing is nothing will ever be that bad again. Then you find out you’re wrong.’
Nora sank into her chair.
Grace was wrong.
Nora didn’t know what had happened in the past, but Alden’s account of shooting Robert Evans had been so heartfelt she had to believe it. The investigation would bear that out, she was sure of it. But no matter how Brittingham had spun it, her narrative shouldn’t be part of the story. Even though she knew better. How many years had she spent schooling clients that perception was reality?
Somehow, she was going to have to change the perception being formed of her in Chateau.
EIGHTEEN
Penelope found Nora not in her trailer where she should have been working on her book but in the kitchen with a streak of flour across her face stirring up batter for a cake. Michael Murphy, already the recipient of a flake of butter after she’d greased and floured the shallow rectangular pan, lay practically across her feet, positioned for more opportunity.